Building a business case for inner city regeneration

Claus was commissioned as part of a Zutari-led team by the City of Cape Town to conduct an economic impact assessment of a multi-billion rand, transport investment-led regeneration programme for the Bellville CBD. Claus was responsible for conceptualising and pioneering novel methods to estimate both the direct, and indirect, economic impacts of the proposed work programme. Beyond conventional quantification methods, Claus included – for the first time in South Africa – agglomeration elasticities calibrated to spatially disaggregated employment and income tax data. He augmented the monetary components with a qualitative case study on the redistributive effects of the investment on nearby low income communities.